It's like discovering flowers growing on the moon. Yet here they are, scattered over cracked gray clay hills like random jewels. The Gumbo Lily, not a true lily but a member of the evening primrose family, has four large heart-shaped petals in a dense white blossom, heartbreakingly lovely snuggled against this impossible, murderous soil, the stuff of cat litter. The western Dakotas are the easternmost limit of this flower's range, and what a lovely symbol for the many surprises a spring trip to Badlands National Park offers visitors.
My friends and I arrived at the Circle View Guest Ranch, a year-round bed-and-breakfast operation near the heart of Badlands National Park, in the flowering of mid-May. Six miles south of the main park entrance at the tiny town of Interior, we were greeted by owners Phil and Amy Kruse, their two young children and the family burro, Duster.
The approach to the ranch is anything but prepossessing, the low-slung modern ranch house disappearing over the far rim. But inside all is warm friendliness, pleasant rooms, great views, delicious breakfasts cooked by Amy while managing to nurse her youngest, and engaging conversations with Phil, son of two generations of hardy ranchers. Those talks sometimes turn to the government's maddening protection of the endangered black-footed ferret and the prairie dogs it preys upon, which has made ranching "impossible" around here. Which is why he and his brother and friends hand-built the Circle View on the family's 3,000 acres.
The arrangement allows them to remain living on the land they love by soaking up the dollars of very happy guests like my group of four and others from as close as Iowa and as distant as Boston and Arizona. After three breakfasts together, and post-dinner bouts of foosball and pingpong in the game room, we were all firm friends.
Outside, the eroded moonscape of our arrival gives way past lily-dotted clay humps to the surprise of the White River Valley below, named for its white clay sediment, coming alive with greening pastures and budding cottonwoods and willow, evening serenades of coyotes and a dawn chorus of lark sparrows, a rooster, bellowing cows and wild turkeys gobbling for mates, a working bottomlands farm.
Our guide is David Astin, my Minneapolis birding guru, a retired wildlife science teacher and skilled nature photographer who recently spent nearly two months living in and photographing the park. He knows every nook of the park's spectacular wedding cake geology and where to find abundance in a place architect Frank Lloyd Wright called, in 1935, "a revelation." For the next two days we drove and hiked the park's varied landscapes, discovering the proof of Wright's assertion over and over, beginning with geology and ending with astronomy.
Up to now I had never wondered about the odd name of Wall, S.D., the town famous for its drugstore a short drive north of the park. Now I know. It is located on the treeless plain just above the dramatically eroded "wall" of the ancient White River watershed, a steep descent of gullies, pyramids, organ pipes and other unusual formations that are the famous Badlands scenery, still eroding an inch a year.
In fact, the generic geological term "badlands" originated from the name given this region by early French trappers. The White River Badlands, approximately 100 miles long and 3 to 5 miles wide, form the core of Badlands National Park sandwiched between Buffalo Gap National Grasslands and the Pine Ridge Ogalala Lakota Nation, which has a joint management agreement for the southern section of the park.